Cary Grant, Italian Style

By RICHARD CORLISS

What a gift and a burden, to be Marcello Mastroianni. Though none of his 150 or so films were made in Hollywood, he is the consummate movie star: charming, at ease in his celebrity, with the light, self-deprecating tilt to his wit that royalty wears so well. The face wears well too. At 63 it has settled into a comfortable handsomeness. Today Mastroianni is exhausted from too many interviews on this Manhattan visit to promote his film Dark Eyes. But like a Casanova tantalized by the inevitability of one more conquest, he will of course accommodate another visitor. It is his pleasure and his business to walk onto the stage of a magazine page, to tell the familiar stories and improvise new ones. So the graceful hands sculpt air to illustrate a point. The smile invites. Even the famous world-weary shrug amounts to conspiratorial flirtation. "You pretend it's true," the gesture says, "and I'll pretend it isn't." It is a marvelous performance. Who else could play Marcello Mastroianni so convincingly?

Not that there has been only one Marcello to play. In his first eminence, as the cynical journalist in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita and the indecisive director in Fellini's 8 1/2, Mastroianni might have been typed as an existentialist heartthrob, a Valentino for the atomic age. But by the early '60s he was also playing a comic-pathetic roue in Divorce, Italian Style; a quiet-spoken syndicalist in The Organizer; a trio of Italian males in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. From these disparate parts emerged the full image of Mastroianni: a sensual, reasonable man, agreeably passive, remarkably resilient, lost and vulnerable behind the mask of bravado. A man who wins, or survives, through a weakness: his ironic understanding that his deceits fool no one and charm all. A Continental Cary Grant, full of comic suavity, but with no guaranteed Hollywood happy endings.

That was, and remains, the Mastroianni character. But Mastroianni the artist is more complex, a creator of delicious surprises and subtle tonal shifts. Romano, the ebullient loser he plays in Nikita Mikhalkov's Dark Eyes, is a virtual anthology of Marcello males, and the actor finds vibrant life in each of them. In his rich wife's mansion Romano is the buffoon philanderer, tiptoeing toward domestic calamity. At the spa he is the exuberant courtier, wading into a mud bath to retrieve a woman's hat. On business in Russia he is the dapper salesman, mainly of himself. And years later, reminiscing with a stranger, he is the old seducer whose spirit nearly broke when his heart did. Dark Eyes won Mastroianni the Best Actor prize at this year's Cannes Film Festival and, by rights, should earn him an Oscar nomination next February.

Running endless engaging variations on this character has given the actor a "nice, comfortable career in cinema." It has also teased audiences into believing the Marcello males are transparent masks for Mastroianni the man. The actor will oblige this pretense. "Basically," he says in a melodic baritone slightly rasped by his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit, "there is always yourself. On yourself you build. First the foundation, then the floors. So what I try to do is to offer myself undressed, without any covering. And in a naive way, as if it was the first time. Forget that I am a movie star. Forget, forget! I am ready to run all the risks."

He has been taking risks since he was born, in the town of Fontana Liri, near Rome, to a carpenter who eventually went blind and a housewife who eventually went deaf. ("They were like a comic couple," he notes.) When the German army occupied Italy, Marcello was sent to a labor camp. He escaped and hid in a tailor's attic in Venice until the end of the war. He had studied to be an architect but drifted into acting, making his film debut in 1947 in I Miserabili. The following year he joined Luchino Visconti's Milan theater troupe. "It was the most important company in Italy," he says. "So I got into the theater from the golden door."

In 1957 Mastroianni attained Italian film stardom as the wistful suitor in Visconti's White Nights, and in 1959 Fellini made him an international icon by casting him in La Dolce Vita. Mastroianni compares these two men, who were crucial to his career: "Visconti was the teacher. Severe, but we like him. Fellini is your benchmate, the one you sit next to and make jokes. With Fellini, always we make it a joke. The more serious the film, the more we laugh. We don't say, 'Oh, maestro, how beautiful is this thing you are creating!' We think this, but we don't say this."

The joys of creation and camaraderie are essential to Mastroianni's career. "When I make films, I am absolutely happy," he says with a grin. "That's why I make so many films. This is a most beautiful thing, to be with 60, 70 people on a set and to make stories. It helps me to act. I work seriously but never take myself seriously. I want to enjoy myself -- really enjoy -- like a child. Because all actors are children. If it is a limit that an actor is still a child, it is also a miracle. And when the film is finished, I am looking for another film. Otherwise my life is a little more bored."

Few would call the actor's private life boring, and Mastroianni would not call it private. He has been married to the indulgent Flora for 37 years; their daughter Barbara is 35. But then there is Chiara, his 15-year-old daughter by Actress Catherine Deneuve. Ask him about his limitations, and you get the shrug. "Perhaps I don't be so faithful," he says. "Actors make promises, and they don't keep promises. This infantile nature follows us. Whoever lives with an actor has to accept that he needs to live a little in his fantasies."

For three decades now, all moviegoers have lived in the fantasies that this man-child Latin lover embodies with such sweet vigor. Grazie, Marcello, whoever you are.

With reporting by Naushad S. Mehta/New York